


Hanging on a Hope But I'm All Right

by nonisland



Series: amie Éponine [3]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, レ・ミゼラブル 少女コゼット | Les Misérables: Shoujo Cosette (Anime)
Genre: Actually unrequited love, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Era, F/M, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Not Pastiche, Unrequited Love, went on for a mere 700 words about the french penal code of 1791
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23871589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonisland/pseuds/nonisland
Summary: She realizes, sharply, that she asked him for something dangerous and he seems willing to hand it carelessly over to her, thief that she is, Thénardier’s daughter.Or, Éponine and Courfeyrac continue to bond over the common cause, philosophical discussions about sodomy laws, and whatever exactly it is about Marius.
Relationships: Courfeyrac & Éponine Thénardier, Courfeyrac/Marius Pontmercy, Marius Pontmercy/Éponine Thénardier, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Éponine Thénardier & Les Amis de l'ABC
Series: amie Éponine [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1705690
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Hanging on a Hope But I'm All Right

**Author's Note:**

> What canon’s timeline is this? Who knows. Listen, if Tom Hooper can completely shuffle the order that Alain Boublil already shuffled from the novel, who am I to deny myself the same. It veers closer in absolute terms to musical/movie timeline, and uses the musical/movie’s setup for Marius’s relationship with Cosette, but squeezes another day or two in between Marius first meeting Cosette and the revolution beginning. Parts of this are _Shoujo Cosette_ again; it’s only vaguely pretending to be movie-canon derived at this point but hasn’t committed to being any specific other thing either.
> 
> Profound thanks to [Sour_Idealist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist) for audiencing at every stage of the way, from untangling part of the series endgame to making sure I actually hit the beats I intended to. Any errors that remain are entirely my fault.
> 
> Title again from the Carpenters’ “I Need to Be in Love.”
> 
> * * *

Marius Pontmercy isn’t any of the things that Éponine had once wanted in a husband—he’s pleasant-looking but not so beautiful that people would turn and stare when he walks into a room; he’s as poor as she is, scraping pennies just the same as she does, with no house or carriage or park.

He’s kind.

He’s so kind Éponine, who hasn’t even seen kindness since Cosette left, doesn’t know what to do with herself. He listens when she speaks, as if she’s a lady worth something instead of a guttersnipe whose argot grates roughly on her own ears, and doesn’t laugh as she trains her accent to match his. He talks about the weather, or her garden, as if he’s willing to spend time with her.

She could marry him, and be with him forever, somewhere safe; she could marry him, and wake to kindness every day, if only he wanted to marry her as well. She would take far less than marriage, if Marius were only the sort of man to offer. She would be kept by him in a garret and feast on bread gone stale as stone.

Éponine had never thought what it might be like to fall in love, but now she knows: it’s the feeling that your beloved is your only air, that you’re dying a little more every second you’re away from them.

Marius is gentle, and shy, and he doesn’t notice how she feels. She can’t imagine telling him—she doesn’t want his pity. She only wants the dream, to take out on cold nights to warm herself with and put away before morning.

* * *

Les Amis de l’ABC, Éponine realizes to her surprise, are nearly as kind as Marius. She hadn’t thought there was as much kindness as this in the world.

Jean Prouvaire helps her recreate her garden. Feuilly brings her piecework sometimes, and pays her for what she does, so she can have money that isn’t charity or theft. He understands, even if none of the others but Marius do.

Grantaire is bad company but safe because of it, like sitting in the dark when you don’t have the heart to light a candle even if you have a candle in front of you. It comforts Éponine, knowing that there’s someone else who doesn’t have the same rose-tinted view of the future as the rest, being able to relax for a moment without having to believe. Bahorel is a different kind of bad company; he makes sure Éponine can throw a punch (she laughs in his face at the idea of fighting as cleanly as _punching_ , and he lets her laugh) and tells her if she ever needs to break something he can find her something breakable.

Combeferre worries about her health, which _nobody_ has ever done before, and her education, which he and Feuilly both take for granted she should have. Éponine is so used to insisting she could have been a student that she barely knows what to say when someone agrees; Combeferre glances over her French and starts her on Latin, without hesitation and as if she deserves to have it it as much as he does, and Feuilly brings her newspapers and tells her about the state of the world, as if the two of them can really change it. Joly and Laigle keep inviting her to the Café Musain, even when there isn’t a meeting, until Éponine feels herself comfortable dropping in when she’s lonely, and then realizes that _lonely_ is something she can be.

Even Enjolras, who clearly isn’t used to listening to other people, stops and listens to her when she tells him flat that he’s wrong. He doesn’t like it, but he does it. He’s rich; she can tell in the way he moves, the way he handles furniture, the way he wears his clothes. His family’s house would have been a prize to rob. He can quote scholars and philosophers right along with Combeferre. All that, and still, when Éponine says, “They can’t do that” or “What’s the benefit to them?” he stops.

And of course there’s Courfeyrac, who’s taken Gavroche in and who somehow made all these other kindnesses a debt _he_ owes _Éponine_ , and also a way that she can make Marius happy, all at once.

Courfeyrac was right—it _does_ make Marius happy, not having to worry about her. Marius has told her that, more than once. They see each other less often but more easily now, not daily moments stolen from her parents but easy, lingering hours of chatter and laughter they both drift in and out of. It might be bliss.

It might, except that it feels like that worry for her was all that ever tethered Marius to Éponine at all.

* * *

Éponine is half-listening to Enjolras talking enthusiastically with Bahorel and Prouvaire about something they’re planning with a group of students, with Combeferre weighing in occasionally in a more measured way. The other half of her attention is on Marius, of course, as he sits frowning into a half-drunk cup of coffee as if he expects to find visions of the future in there.

She looks past Marius and her eyes meet Courfeyrac’s beyond him, a quick striking that sparks recognition in her again. He’s been watching Marius too, with a softer look than anything she’s ever felt. There’s a book in front of him, and a stack of papers, but he’s not paying attention to either.

Éponine eases out of her chair and circles around. She moves lightly, out of long habit, but a good half of this group notices her anyway: Bahorel and Combeferre, Feuilly, Grantaire. Courfeyrac of course was looking at her when she stood, so she won’t count that against herself.

Marius, absorbed in conversation with Joly, doesn’t notice even when she crosses in front of him, a stinging disappointment she’s almost used to now.

She takes the seat across the table from Courfeyrac and says, “Would you owe me another favor if I let you pour out your troubles”—she glances at Marius—“on a sympathetic ear, or would it cancel out because I owed you one for asking about them?” She means, _I still don’t believe that you’re the one in debt to me for everything you’ve done for me._ She thinks Courfeyrac will understand.

“What, here?” Courfeyrac asks, brows going up.

“Of course not,” Éponine says. The Café Musain is a bright, pleasant place, surely over-full of secrets anyway.

“It might be awkward,” Courfeyrac agrees.

Éponine frowns at him in confusion. She’s no fool—men who look for girls ask for their whores openly, but men who look for boys whisper it even in the vilest alleys she’s run through, knowing that even though it’s no more forbidden than buying a girl they’ll be punished for it much more harshly all the same. _Awkward_ isn’t the word she would have chosen—the same harshness must hold for courting couples.

“Some of our friends have sharp ears.”

“I know,” Éponine says, “but…” She doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. She realizes, sharply, that she asked him for something dangerous and he seems willing to hand it carelessly over to her, thief that she is, Thénardier’s daughter.

Courfeyrac leans back in his chair. “Are you religious?”

That one is easy. “No.”

“Particularly fond of the ancien régime?” he asks, laughing now. Joly glances over at the sound, and Marius’s attention follows.

Éponine feels herself go still and painfully earnest under Marius’s gaze, even once he looks away again. She has to force her answer to Courfeyrac: “Oh, certainly, that’s why I’m here.”

“Combeferre!” Courfeyrac calls. “Come over here and tell your pupil about religious anarchy.”

Shaking his head, Combeferre gets up with a few murmured words to Enjolras and the other two, then joins Éponine and Courfeyrac. “Religious anarchy?” he asks.

Courfeyrac, serious for a moment, says, “In ’91, the Constituent Assembly reformed the penal code—imperfectly, to be sure, and impermanently, but they did reform it.”

Éponine knows ’91—if not as well as they do, then still well enough by now. It falls somewhere during France’s only successful revolution, if you don’t accept anything to do with Bonaparte, which they do not.

“The purpose of a just law is to serve the citizens,” Combeferre says, settling in more comfortably. “To create a society where all can thrive, and where actions that cause harm are punished. There’s no place in the law everyone must be bound by for superstitious prejudice, though I wouldn’t call that view itself ‘anarchy.’”

“The Church does,” Courfeyrac says cheerfully. He props his chin on his folded hands.

Combeferre looks like he might say something in response, but doesn’t. Instead he looks back at Éponine and continues, “If you accept the existence of human rights, and the ideal of laws that serve Justice instead of pride…”

He seems to be waiting, so she nods, but feels she needs to add, “Those laws don’t exist.”

“But they should,” Combeferre says, lighting up with enthusiasm. “And we’re making headway—they started during the Revolution, with the understanding that old privilege and custom don’t need to dictate the rights and punishments of the future. The whole purpose of what we’re doing here is to create a way for real progress to transform society and give everyone the freedoms they deserve.”

“Michel Lepeletier, in the Assembly,” Courfeyrac says to Éponine, “explained when he sponsored the Code that the purpose of a law was to punish true crimes, not factitious crimes—what was it, Combeferre? I can never remember if it’s ‘feudalism, taxation’ or ‘taxation, feudalism.’”

Combeferre looks from Courfeyrac to Éponine, and nods slightly in acknowledgement. “‘Factitious crimes, created by superstition, feudalism, taxation, and despotism.’ Or, in other words, church law making up French law.”

Éponine tries to piece it together herself, so she won’t have to ask. There are fewer conversations like this these days, where she feels they’re taking off the back of her head and pouring words in, but not yet few enough to suit her pride. “So it’s a matter of principle with you, because of the Assembly—”

“No,” Combeferre says, before she can dig herself any deeper wrong. “We’re working toward justice in law, the same as the Assembly was. The principle is the same. We admire them for having reached it first, but we can only hope to restore and to build off of their foundations. To re-eliminate the so-called crime of sacrilege. To ensure not just the decriminalization of blasphemy, but equal rights for men—people,” he corrects himself quickly, with another nod to Éponine, “of all faiths, or none. To ensure not just the decriminalization of sodomy itself, but an end to persecution and blackmail for it. And so on, and more than that. The whole Code needs to be reformed again in the new Republic. We need to allow for an end date to punishment for crimes and for rehabilitation of convicts, so that there’s a meaningful difference between a greater crime and a lesser one. We need to reconsider which crimes are greater and lesser at all, to make sure that the poor aren’t punished twice for living.”

“Legal reform and I wasn’t invited?” Prouvaire interrupts softly, sitting down at the last open seat with his back to the room. Well, Éponine thinks, it wasn’t as if either she or Courfeyrac had still been watching Marius. “What are we reforming specifically?”

“Everything, I think,” Courfeyrac says. “Do you need someone to walk you home after, Éponine?”

She hasn’t needed anyone to walk her home in years, or at least she hasn’t _had_ anyone for most of that time, but that’s hardly the point now. “I was heading out soon,” she says. It’s getting late, even with the students’ hours they keep.

Combeferre and Prouvaire slip into a lively discussion, with references that escape Éponine completely, and after a few moments of that she gets up to leave. Courfeyrac jumps up as well, kicking his chair back under the table as he does, and missing and getting the leg of the table with his own.

“Are we rising in the presence of a lady now?” Grantaire asks, standing and sweeping Éponine a bow only a little over-grand with drink. She glares at him for the look of it, but all the same—joke as it is, nobody’s ever bowed to her as if she were really a lady before.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Courfeyrac says. “If she didn’t skin me for it Combeferre would.” He frowns and looks closer at Éponine. “At least, I assume she’d skin me for it.”

Éponine, cornered, shrugs instead of biting.

“If we’re going to rise in the presence of a lady,” Combeferre says, looking up at Éponine, “then it’s only fair to rise in the presence of a gentleman, and at that rate we’ll spend the entirety of every meeting on our feet.”

“And get _nothing_ done,” Enjolras puts in. He sweeps a stern look around the room; it lands hardest on Grantaire, who gives him another bow, more mocking than the one he’d favored Éponine with, before taking a seat again.

“There’s a joke about rising you haven’t thought through,” Laigle says, “which I’m very disappointed in you both for.”

“If we want the people of Paris to rise,” Courfeyrac says, with the air of one changing the subject, as he gathers up his coat and hat, “how can we do less than to set an example for them? But no, I’m walking Éponine home, that’s all.”

* * *

“You have sharp eyes,” he says to her as they round the corner to the rackety old building and the rooms she gets to call her own.

“I can’t be the only one who’s noticed,” Éponine says, flattered in spite of herself. She’s getting soft.

Courfeyrac smiles, the moonlight glinting off the edge of it. “Sharp eyes _and_ courage, then. You’re certainly the only one who’s crossed the Musain to ask me about it.” He considers. “You’re the first one to _ask_ me about it at all, actually, Enjolras just sighs in judgment and Combeferre…”

It’s late enough that the house is quiet as they go upstairs, the barrière dozing around them in uneasy respectability. The stairs creak, but they do that enough on their own, or else more of Éponine’s neighbors have been getting up to more trouble than she thinks.

“Combeferre?” Éponine prompts as she unlocks her door. The locks are a joke, something she could pick with some bourgeoise’s hairpin, but everyone knows she has nothing to steal anyway. She only keeps it locked for the sheer pleasure of it, of being able to say _you come this far and no further_ and expecting someone to listen.

“Combeferre,” Courfeyrac says, ducking under the lintel and closing the door behind him, “is…I don’t know. He doesn’t do that well with feelings either, for all that he’s philosophically in favor of them.”

Éponine’s hands are shaking with suppressed laughter as she tries to get one of her hoarded candles lit—it takes her four tries. “ _Philosophically_ in favor of feelings.”

“Well, you’ve met Enjolras.” Courfeyrac looks around and seats himself on the floor, one leg drawn up in front of him and the other outstretched. “He’s philosophically opposed to them, whereas I’m in favor without any philosophy about it.”

“What am I?” Éponine asks curiously.

Courfeyrac considers her for a moment. “Pragmatically in favor.”

 _Any tool to your hand_ , he might as well have said. Éponine shivers and picks her blanket up to wrap it around her shoulders. “And to think, Marius said you were the _nice_ one.”

“I am very nice!” Courfeyrac says with mock indignation. “I just pay attention.”

There’s a moment’s pause, against the leaping shadows of her room.

“He really doesn’t know, does he,” Éponine asks finally. She’s not sure which of them she even means it about.

“Not a hint,” Courfeyrac says. “Sit down, will you? I’m getting a crick in my neck.”

Éponine sits on the end of her pallet—hers, where she can stretch out like a cat if she wants. It’s still a marvel. “But you know.”

“I recognized it,” Courfeyrac says. The flickering candlelight can’t hide either his smile or the ruefulness of it. “As you recognized it in me, I think.”

“You watch him at the Musain,” Éponine says.

Courfeyrac shrugs without self-consciousness. “He’s worth watching.”

Éponine sighs and leans back against the wall, sinking into the kind of conversation she’d never gotten to have before as she might sink into something impossibly soft. “He is. And he’s so kind.”

“So…” Courfeyrac fumbles for a word and falls short. “I want to take care of him.”

Éponine considers it. “Keep him like a mistress?” She doesn’t see the appeal of the idea—the responsibility of it, the cost, the planning—but she thinks it must be nice for that to be the kind of thing that you could want.

“No!” Courfeyrac says quickly, and then, “Hm. A little, maybe.”

“Buy him things,” she says. “Put him somewhere nice.”

This time Courfeyrac’s shrug is a little less comfortable. “Maybe.”

“You can barely put yourself somewhere nice,” Éponine says. Her pallet slides a little under her as she leans into the wall, and she braces her feet on the floor and remembers to cross her legs at the ankles.

“I could.” Courfeyrac smiles faintly, ruefully. “I have a little more money than that. But what should I do, get rooms in the middle of nowhere and walk that much further to be part of everything? No.”

Éponine sighs. “And he wouldn’t want to be kept. He’s too proud.”

“Same as you,” Courfeyrac says.

“Same as me,” she agrees. It’s a marvel, even now, that they have that much in common, she and Marius. “Does he even—does he go with men like that?”

Courfeyrac shakes his head. “He doesn’t go with anyone, as far as I’ve ever seen or heard.”

“And he’d say if he did?” Éponine asks dubiously. Even if they did have an easy discussion about the injustice of outlawing sodomy that night, the idea of it being a thing that people might mention about themselves, in daylight or lamplight, draws her up short.

“Probably,” Courfeyrac says. His lips move; he counts something off on his fingers. “I’m hardly the only one of us.”

Well—when she had been a thief, she had spent time with thieves. Now that she’s a rebel, she spends time with rebels. It makes sense to huddle together against the law. But still. She thinks again of the warm light of the Musain, the comfort everyone has around each other. Courfeyrac has four fingers counted and is rolling the thumb in the grasp of his other hand, worrying at the knuckle instead of releasing it. “Who else?” she asks, giving in to the greed for knowledge that’s always driven her.

He raises his eyebrows at her. “Have _they_ asked _you_ if you go with women?” Then he winces, as if he’s afraid of what the answer might be—afraid of whether her yes or no was her own choice.

Éponine has missed the worst of life as a beggar and a thief, at least. “It’s all right,” she says. “I’m fine.” And then, consideringly, “You know, I think I would, except—who would I meet, like this? Find a pretty girl in the Jardin du Luxembourg and give her a handful of flowers?” She laughs, self-mockingly; her voice is jagged in her own ears. “And who has time, and what good could it ever do me?”

“Well,” Courfeyrac says, and stops. It’s different for him, of course—she’s glad he knows this.

“I’d wondered,” she says. For a moment she doesn’t go on either; their unfinished sentences hang frozen in the air. Then she admits, “If—if he’s never gone with other women either, since you’ve known him, then maybe it’s not that it’s _me_. Or you. Either of us.”

Courfeyrac’s eyes on her are warmly sincere. “You look much better than you did when you came here, and you’ve always been clever and brave,” he says, in all seriousness. “It’s not that it’s you at all.”

For a moment Éponine sees the room as if from outside her body: the two of them barely a pace away from each other, held in the softness of candlelight, alone awake in the vast concealing darkness of Paris by night.

Part of her—an old, starving part, Éponine Jondrette, Éponine Thénardier—wants to cross the room to him, drag him down to her pallet with her, hold on to him. The new Éponine wants none of that; she wants him to tell her about the Revolution, and what the Three Glorious Days meant to the people who had hoped for them and what it means that they ended the way they did; she wants to watch Enjolras listen to him and Combeferre tease him so gently and dryly it barely registers; she wants to be one of the parts of les Amis de l’ABC he holds together.

“Don’t,” she says quietly. “I could, but—I’d rather not.”

Courfeyrac smiles at her, as charming as ever and no less warm, but lighter again now. “I wouldn’t have so much as asked,” he says. “But I thought you should know, since you were worried.”

Éponine draws a deep breath, filling lungs that don’t ache or rattle. She tastes dust and tallow, the damp soil of her flowerpots; her shoulders drop loosely as she exhales. “Well,” she says. “Thank you. And it’s not—it isn’t that it’s you, either, it’s just that I _like_ you.”

For a moment Courfeyrac’s expression is impossibly sorrowful, but it’s a flicker so quick it’s gone in a moment. “Oh, Éponine,” he says, more lightly than that look had been. “I wish Marius had told us about you years ago.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

He shakes his head.

They talk about other things for a few moments more—little things, nothing at all, only enough to be sure they’ve found their footing again—before he wishes her goodnight and leaves.

Éponine blows out her candle and gets ready for bed in the dark.

* * *

_It’s not that it’s you at all_ , Courfeyrac had promised her in April, and Éponine had taken comfort from that.

There is not enough comfort to be had in all of France, let alone one conversation more than a month ago, this first of June as Marius begs her to find a girl—the most beautiful girl, the most wonderful, the most impossibly lovely—a girl who has stolen his heart with a single glance.

Cosette has always been like this, of course, but Marius could still have run Éponine through the heart with a Guardsman’s bayonet and it would have been kinder.

Cosette had been like this when _she_ was the one in rags, grubby and exhausted and bone-thin and constantly trembling from fear. Only Thénardier and his wife seemed immune from her impossible charm. Éponine had been cruel, because if she hadn’t the Thénardiers would have been crueler—and to her as well as to Cosette. Even Gavroche had never cried when Cosette was the one to rock his cradle, or later on to help him stumble from place to place, or still later to play with him, invented games with twigs and leaves that made them both laugh with delight and tore Éponine’s heart up with jealousy that she was left out. Gavroche listened to Cosette; he never listens to Éponine, even now.

And there’d been a boy, once, in Montfermeil, good-looking and funny, who had time for Éponine only until he saw her parents’ ragged little servant girl. How angry Éponine had been! How unfair it had seemed, that Cosette should get that.

Cosette is lovely now, in a new dress and bonnet, skin clean, face round with good health and her complexion gone to cream and roses. Her hair shines like gold. She is radiant.

How unfair it _is_ , Éponine thinks wretchedly, that now that she’s the one with so little else, and Cosette the one with comfort—and a loving guardian, from the gentleness with which the nameless man who had bought her free of the Thénardiers took her elbow and the trust with which Cosette followed him—and still it’s Cosette who draws every eye and makes every heart follow. 

Éponine has never, ever been anything next to Cosette.

* * *

She drifts around collecting rumors and comes to the Café Musain late that night. The back room is abuzz. Gavroche is sitting on the railing at the top of the stairs, talking twenty to the dozen with Courfeyrac.

Éponine sighs and works past both of them, winding her way through the press of tables and chairs and loud chatter until she reaches Marius, who is gazing into space from the table he’s sharing with Grantaire and Joly and Laigle.

“Did you find her?” Marius asks, jolting upright in his seat as he sees Éponine.

Grantaire grimaces sympathetically at her. Joly, loudly, says, “Perhaps she has news of _Lamarque_.”

It’s a little too loud—heads turn. “No,” Éponine says to all of them, and then to Marius, “nothing.” She manages a smile. “There’s plenty of talk of revolution, but no…”

Grantaire borrows Joly’s cane to hook another chair over to their table. “Sit or declaim, as you prefer.”

“I’ll sit,” Éponine says. There’s every chance she might actually need to stand on a chair if she ever wanted to make a speech to Les Amis—Bahorel is a giant of a man; Enjolras towers over her with Marius very little behind him, and only Joly comes even close to her own scant height—but since she never has, that hasn’t been a problem.

“Paris is ready,” Enjolras—asks, maybe, because he seems to be waiting for her answer. She nods, and he nods back and turns to Combeferre and Feuilly again.

Marius whispers, “What did you learn?”

“That Paris is ready for revolution,” Éponine says as patiently as she can. She’s learned a few other things too—she does know her way around—but she can hardly spill a handful of rumors in front of Marius as if they’re the answers he wanted. “I have a few hints; I’ll look around again tomorrow, if I can.”

“Good,” Marius says. “Thank you.”

Laigle nudges his cup of wine over toward her. Éponine smiles at him and shakes her head—it would be too easy to drink herself senseless, some days, though the more she’s been able to afford senselessness the less she’s been tempted by it.

“Éponine!” Courfeyrac calls. “Come over here and talk some sense into your brother.”

She makes her excuses to the men at Marius’s table and makes her way back to the stairs. “What now?” she asks.

“I’m going to the barricades when they rise,” Gavroche tells her.

“The hell you are,” Éponine says, startled into rudeness. She glances at Courfeyrac, who doesn’t blink, and then guiltily behind her. If anyone heard, they don’t show it.

Gavroche eels away from Courfeyrac. “Try and stop me,” he says.

“Gavroche!” Éponine shouts as he starts down the stairs, skipping and tumbling the whole way, more like a leaf than a boy.

“You’re going!” he yells back from the ground floor. “If you are, I am too!”

“Are you going?” Courfeyrac asks her, low.

Éponine nods. “Where else would I be?” she asks.

“Well,” Courfeyrac says, even more softly than before. “Looking for Marius’s been-and-gone love, maybe?”

She has to bite her lip, hard, to keep back the tears that want to well in her eyes. “He told you all about her, then?”

“Struck to the bone by delight, world changed, soul on fire.” Courfeyrac tries to smile, and doesn’t quite manage it. “Did he give you anything more to go on?”

“I was there,” Éponine says. “Should we…?”

He pushes away from the railing and takes her elbow to escort her downstairs. Nobody will even notice she’s gone, in the joyful chaos of anticipation above.

“What _is_ she like?” Courfeyrac asks, as they come out onto the ground floor of the café. It’s deserted, at this time of night and with this kind of plotting going on overhead. Gavroche has gone already, with enough of a lead that she’ll never catch him unless he wants her to. Unlike Cosette and her guardian, Gavroche knows the streets too well to be found again.

“Lovely,” Éponine says sadly. “She’s—”

Her voice breaks.

Courfeyrac pulls her against his chest, his arms warm around her shoulders. “Ssh,” he murmurs. The cape of his greatcoat swings around her face, hiding it from the empty room, and she rests her forehead against him and breathes for a moment. She won’t cry. She doesn’t cry. She just needs another moment.

There’s a light pressure against the top of her head, the prickle of stubble, too soft to be his jaw—his cheek, then, resting against her.

Éponine’s eyes burn again as she returns Courfeyrac’s hug, holding him with all the strength in her arms. “Easy,” he says, voice uneven even at a whisper. “You’re stronger than you think.”

She eases her grip. His breath stirs her hair, ragged and shaking as she feels. Nobody turns to Éponine for comfort, never has. She doesn’t know how to give it, but she holds on anyway, trusting the path of her hand against his shoulder though she doesn’t yet trust her voice again.

“Thank you,” he breathes after a moment, barely a sound at all.

Courfeyrac is the bright center of their group, drifting from place to place, drawing everyone in—drawing even her and Gavroche in, when he didn’t have to. If this is all he has now, this dark corner beneath the upper room of the Musain—if she is all he has now to be here while he hurts, well. He’s giving her his best already; she can hardly do less than that.

**Author's Note:**

> The French Penal Code of 1791, and Louis-Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau and his statement about factitious crimes, are both real (in French “feudalism, taxation” is “féodalité, fiscalité”—easier to mix up than in English). Sacrilege—the theft or destruction of Catholic holy items—was re-criminalized during the Bourbon Restoration. I did gloss over most of the rest of the “factitious crimes” that the Assembly de-criminalized, as some of them are less victimless than it must have seemed in 1791 and the rest are still much less fun conversation than sacrilege, blasphemy, and sodomy.
> 
> As Éponine thinks and Combeferre says, the legality of sodomy had nothing to do with a lack of persecution for queer sexuality. There was a case a few years after the new Code where a sodomy charge made it to trial before anyone realized the law had been changed and the men had been charged with a nonexistent crime. Consistently, other men were relentlessly charged with public indecency, or, as Combeferre says, blackmailed, or chased down for other crimes. I also don’t have specific details on male prostitution in the 1830s in France; I took a guess there. (As ever, tracking down queer women’s history is even harder than tracking down queer men’s, and I have no updates on that front, which is probably itself an update.)
> 
> This whole thing is patchwork, but it does overall seem like, if you were queer and intending to hang out with straight people (“what straight people?” I don’t know), the safest group to pick would be a group of revolutionaries getting their guiding philosophy from an agnostic utopian who believes that superstition and prejudice are harmful to humanity.
> 
> (But also, seriously, what straight people.)


End file.
